Denis Rancourt poses for a photo outside the Elgin St. courthouse in Ottawa, Thursday, May 15, 2014. Rancourt is the defendant in a $1M defamation libel suit filed by uOttawa law professor Joanne St. Lewis (not pictured). The civil jury trial is expected to last about a month. Mike Carroccetto / Ottawa Citizen NEG# 117084Mike Carroccetto
/ Ottawa Citizen

When Joanne St. Lewis did a Google search in 2011 and saw her name linked to Denis Rancourt’s description of her as University of Ottawa president Allan Rock’s “house Negro,” she felt shocked and overwhelmed.

“I didn’t expect anything like that. It just wasn’t and isn’t who I am,” the University of Ottawa law professor testified Thursday at the start of a four-week jury trial of her $1-million defamation lawsuit against Rancourt, a former physics professor who was fired by the university in 2009.

“I wondered how anybody could say that about me,” she told the court in response to questions by her lawyer, Richard Dearden. “I knew right away it was a lie.”

At home that night, “my stomach was churning,” an emotional St. Lewis told the six-member jury. “It was just this horrible awful, nightmarish thing that had happened to me.”

Rancourt made the “house Negro” comment in two articles he posted on his U of O Watch blog in response to St. Lewis’s evaluation of a student-produced report alleging systemic racism in the university’s academic fraud process.

St. Lewis, director of the university’s Human Rights Research and Education Centre, was asked to evaluate the report by Robert Major, the university’s academic vice president.

She concluded that its methodology was weak and its conclusions were unsupported. But she also recommended that the university conduct an independent review to determine if racism played any role in its academic fraud process.

In her testimony, St. Lewis said Rancourt’s description of her has left her feeling powerless. “It’s on the Internet. It’s there for everybody to see. It’s a lie. And I can’t do anything about it.”

It has also “swallowed up” her many professional accomplishments, said St. Lewis, who has focused on human rights and social justice throughout her career.

Thanks to Rancourt, St. Lewis said, she’s now seen “through this narrow filter. That’s me today. I can’t begin to tell you how disturbing it is for me to not control my own public personality.”

In her statement of claim, St. Lewis alleged that Rancourt’s house Negro comment likened her evaluation to academic fraud, implied that she supported racism, lacked integrity and “acted in a servile manner” toward Rock.

In his statement of defence, Rancourt denied those allegations, calling the meaning alleged by St. Lewis “extrapolated and misguided.” He alleged that her lawsuit was designed to punish, intimidate and silence him.

In his opening statement to the jury, Rancourt said he has always written his blog in a “direct, provocative style.”

He does so, he said, to “provoke and motivate” societal change and set an example for students to follow. “I do it honestly out of good faith.”

Rancourt called the phrase house Negro a “common term” used to describe privileged minority members who act to minimize the concerns of their own groups.

He said the report on systemic racism on campus was “quite serious and quite worrisome.” St. Lewis’s evaluation, he alleged, was “faulty and biased,” lacking in independence and part of a university attempt to minimize an issue that was attracting widespread media attention.

He told the jury he will argue fair comment and that St. Lewis missed statutory deadlines for filing her lawsuit.

Dearden told the jury St. Lewis has been a pioneer within the legal profession. She was the first black female law student at the University of British Columbia and the only black woman ever elected as a bencher of the Law Society of Upper Canada.

“She has fought all her life against racism, against discrimination and for minority rights,” he said.

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'I knew right away it was a lie," U of O professor says of 'house Negro' description

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